The present disclosure relates to aircraft communications and, more specifically, to systems and methods of wireless communications between an aircraft on the ground and a ground-based location.
Aircraft are routinely equipped with sensors to establish estimates of wear and tear, load conditions, etc., so that maintenance may be carried out in a proactive manner. This data is downloaded to ground-based computers for further analysis and processing after the aircraft has landed. Current technologies for downloading aircraft data may include wireless communication in frequency bands around 2.4 Gigahertz (GHz) and commercial communication frequencies such as Groupe Special Mobile (GSM) or Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standards. However, these frequency bands are also used by devices that are increasingly being used by airline passengers, such as mobile laptop computers, tablet computers, smartphones, etc. Thus aircraft data communication competes for bandwidth with these passenger devices. Additionally, the combination of decreasing cost of sensors and increasing capability in computing is leading to orders of magnitude increase in the amount of acquired data per flight on each aircraft, thus requiring more bandwidth.